My Experience Managing a Blog in Blocs

Creating and managing a blog in Blocs is a much better experience than you think, but a few limitations might be a dealbreaker for some people.

If you don’t need a built-in search and complex structure, Blocs is great for Blogging.

Creating and hosting multiple websites with Blocs is much cheaper than doing so with tools like Squarespace, which requires you to pay the separate hosting fees for each of your sites. I have quite a few websites, so I have decided to recreate most of them with Blocs.

As I have said multiple times before, I believe that when it comes to building static websites, Blocs is the best web design tool for macOS. At the same time, making content-driven sites with a complex blog or gallery pages using Blocs is not as easy as on CMS-based platforms like Squarespace. So, I have asked myself: “What will it be like to blog with Blocs?”

The short answer is it is a better experience than you might think.

It is possible to create a beautiful and reasonably complex blog with Blocs, but it requires more manual work and planning at first. The added trouble might not worth it for some people, especially who update their blog multiple times a day.

Freedom over Convenience

Having tried both methods, I prefer the complete design freedom I get with Blocs over the convenience of the template-based solution. Once I design the perfect page for the article, I can duplicate and edit it every time I want to add a new post to my blog, so it is also not as much work as it seems.

Little Time Difference

Adding the new page with a post, adding the post thumbnail and short description to the blog list, manually managing the categories or tags might sound like it is much work. It turns out it is not as much more work as it seems.

I do spend about five extra minutes formatting the article, but since it usually takes me about 1 to 2 hours to write one article, an extra five minutes to make it look better hardly make it more difficult.

Limitations and Dealbreakers

However, of course, blogging with Blocs is not for everyone. If you plan to post multiple articles per day, or you want to have dozens of categories and tags, blogging with Blocs is not something I would recommend you to do.

The blog on my websites has only four categories, so it is easy for me to manage it efficiently.

My blog has just four categories and pretty simple structure, so it is easy for visitors to navigate and find a post they want, but for more complex blogs with big archives, the absence of search capabilities in Blocs might be a dealbreaker.

Conclusion

Blogging with Blocs gives you the full freedom to express your creativity, and it will not take a lot more of your time if you plan your blog design and structure in advance. At the same time, if you want to build a complex magazine-style blog with built-in search, Blocs is not the right tool for you.

Let me know if you are interested in behind the scenes of how I blog with Blocs, and I might come up with a video or even a series of videos on how to build and manage a blog with Blocs.